The Point

Friday, September 08, 2006

这个不是中文博客

是不是拷打？Shockingly, US President Bush publicly announced today, in anticipation of the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, that the United States has been using a system of covert jails around the world to detain and obtain information from terrorist suspects believed to be connected to al-Qaeda. Bush has defended the use of these secret prisons as necessary in the 'war on terror,' arguing that the 14 men now acknowledged to have been held at these prisons are a serious threat to national security for the United States and its allies. Let's stop here for a moment. I think his near-admission that the Central Intelligence Agency has been using increasingly cruel and humiliating techniques--in all likelihood constituting torture--to extract information from suspects demands a critical look at what 'terror' has come to mean in light of confessed state-sponsored human rights abuses on the US' behalf here.

That we are even having a conversation about the line between torture, as defined by international human rights conventions, and 'merely' inhumane extractive techniques that tiptoe the line... well, it's demonstrative of much larger problems in the US administration's misguided attempts to ensure security for its people. Mainichi Daily News quotes Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Investigator on Torture, as pointing out that even the use of secret detention facilities itself 'violate[s] anti-torture commitments under international law because keeping detainees in such places is a form of enforced disappearance.' Even the Chinese government has condemned the operation of such prisons, charging that 'anti-terror efforts should observe the principal of the U.N. charter and the basic norms governing international relations.' Now you've got to do some soul searching here if the PRC of all governments is criticising your cavalier approach to human rights.

One of the oft-quoted techniques alleged to be employed by the CIA on suspects like the 14 now being shuffled to Guantanamo Bay is waterboarding, and since the term itself was foggy to me beyond rumours that Toronto Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff might support it in some cases, I decided to poke around to find out more about it. Fortunately for me, someone has already done a little poking.

Michael, of American blog Here's What's Left, quotes Mark Danner, in his book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror on an one woman's account of waterboarding during Argentina's Dirty War:
She was immediately blindfolded. Her first torture session was in a basement full of soldiers, where she was stripped naked, tied, and beaten. "They slapped my face, pinched my breasts. 'You have to talk, this is your last opportunity, and this is your salvation.' And then they put me on a table. And I thought, 'Well, if they are going to kill me, I hope they kill me pretty soon.' They pushed my head underwater, so I could not breathe. They take you out, ask you things, they put you in, they take you out—so you cannot breathe all the time. 'Who did you receive this from? Who do you know?' Who can control anything when you cannot breathe? They pull you out, you try to grab for air, so they put you back in so you swallow water, and it is winter and you are very cold and very scared and they do that for a long time. Even if you are a good swimmer you cannot stand it anymore...."

Michael goes on to point out that

... [t]he issue is not... some sort of fictitious, academic reductio ad absurdum scenario in which Osama has the code to disarm the nuclear bomb that's about to go off in Times Square, and we have him in custody, and our moral duty to the people in Manhattan conflicts with our duty to oppose torture, etc. Such a scenario has as little to do with torture as the issue of whether you'd shoot a guy threatening your mom has with to do with murder... The issue is one of normativity.

But don't ask me. Read it for yourself.

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posted by Christopher at 3:51 a.m.

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